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Thursday, July 26, 2012

Pixar Was Feminist Before Brave (Just Ask Mrs. Incredible)

Look, I’ll be straight with you to get this party rolling.
(Not that I’m usually lying to you. You know what I mean.) I still haven’t seen
Brave. Now, a lot of this is my own
fault, since it did come out before I went to Vietnam, and it was playing in
theaters when I got here. But it hasn’t come up, okay? I’m definitely going to
see it on DVD.

I have, though, been reading as many spoiler-free articles
about the movie as I can, and I think it’s time we discussed a little
something.

Merida is not Pixar’s first feminist character. Sure, she’s
their first female protagonist, and that’s wonderful and great and super cool.
But. She is not the first feminist character that Pixar has ever featured, and
this movie did not change the game in any big way as regards their writing
tendencies.

Good? Okay.

No, actually, despite their lack up to now in creating
female protagonists, Pixar has actually been really good about giving us
well-rounded female characters who are, dare I say it, feminist. I’m going to
use Mrs. Incredible as an example.

Now, I don’t actually like calling her Mrs. Incredible,
because it identifies her as a knockoff of Mr. Incredible, but the name fits
and it’s the one she’s best known by. At the start of the movie, she’s
Elasti-Girl, a freewheeling superhero who doesn’t have time for marriage and
babies. So, when we skip a few years later, and discover that she’s married,
living in suburbia and raising three kids while her husband goes to work at an
insurance firm, I was totally expecting her to have some pretty serious angst.

Except she didn’t. While her husband agonized over the
meaninglessness of his existence, Mrs. Incredible calmly took care of her kids,
planned for vacations, and made lunches for school. In anyone else’s hands,
this reversal would seem like a sign that she was finally “in her place”, that
being a superhero was her fantasy. In coming back down to reality, she
discovered that home and children were where her real talents lay.

That’s bullshit, and also not the direction that the movie
takes it. Instead, it just shows that Mrs. Incredible is a very strong person.
She was strong enough to be a hero, and strong enough to keep going when she
couldn’t be a hero anymore.

So when her husband is stupid enough to allow himself to be
captured (sorry, but it’s true), she goes after him. Not only does she save
him, but she also does it stealthily, effectively, and pretty quickly given the
circumstances. She’s not afraid to use the Mom Voice, and when Mr. Incredible
tries to leave her behind for the final battle, she reads him the riot act.

Mrs. Incredible isn’t just good at being a hero, or good at
being a mom, she’s a fully real character capable of adapting when her life
doesn’t turn out the way she planned, or when she really needs to step up her
game and go full badass. She’s a badass, in all of the possible ways.

At the very end of the movie, when Syndrome tries to kidnap
Jack-Jack, she actually has her husband throw
her into the sky to get him back. That’s being a badass.

Merida wasn’t Pixar’s first feminist character, and, really,
neither was Mrs. Incredible. Pixar is veritably littered with feminist heroes. From
the single mom in Toy Story, to EVE
in Wall-E, to Ellie in Up, there are tons of places we can look
to see awesome female characters to show our daughters. Mrs. Incredible is just
the start.

And none of this is meant to deride Brave or Merida. I’m sure she’s a lovely character, and it really
is awesome that Pixar is now making movies with female leads. But to say that
she’s the first feminist character from this studio? Well that’s just false
advertising.